


metamorphosis

by mutterandmumble



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Death, Gen, Introspection, Rebirth, Stream of Consciousness, baby’s first resurrection, etc etc - Freeform, lightly implied thanzag, not much dialogue, some liberties taken regarding timelines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29079378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: The first time that Zagreus dies, it feels like coming home.Or: in which Zagreus lives, dies, and lives again
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	metamorphosis

**Author's Note:**

> cw for semi-graphic depictions of death and disconnect, mentions of blood and injury (specifically burns), mild body horror, complicated family relationships, and some weird relationships with reality 
> 
> This takes place in canon universe but with no regard at all for the timelines, which mostly just means that Thanatos is sort of, almost present. Anyways this was just me thinking about death in the context of the game and then immortality as a whole and then how the first resurrection may have felt because i imagine that it would be at least a _little_ off-putting regardless of whether or not someone is actually physically able to die. Like I feel like there are better ways to spend an afternoon, you know? 
> 
> Anyways, I hope you enjoy!

The first time that Zagreus dies, it feels like coming home. 

There’s a warmth to it, a heat like the slide of someone’s breath along his neck or the curl of fingers around his shoulder, a familiarity that worms itself into his head and then winds itself around his spine as his body gives one last heave and then his soul jumps and rattles and flails right out of him. Things become a blur, the world melting off into a slurry of grays and blacks and blues and a soft ache where the flames that lie thick over the walls of the House of Hades flicker at the edges of the vague form that he’s taken. There is something holding him together from where his stomach ought to be, a slow simmer at his core that keeps him from falling apart entirely, and the whole wide world is surviving inside of him and he is nothing and he is everything and he is made of light and blood and bone and then there is someone holding him. Closely, carefully, with a hand cupped around the back of his not-quite neck as they adjust their movement to the sway and shift of his internal gravity. 

It’s a very strange feeling. It’s a subtle, soft transformation, the sort of inside-out body horror that comes from being held together by a prayer and a wish and a few scant scraps of hot-blooded single-mindedness, and he can feel himself lapping up against the rest of the world like water on a riverbank, sweltering and soaking into whoever it is that’s holding him until they couldn’t scrub him from their skin for love or life or love of life itself. It’s a way of experiencing things that he thinks he would dislike if he were capable of dislike at the moment; life is being filtered through him and it’s leaving bits of itself behind, a shard embedded near his lung and another lodged behind his knee, one through his stomach and one through his head and one, two, three through his hands. It’s an infestation, bloomed from beneath where his skin would be if he had skin, and it’s constant and it’s unyielding and it hurts like hell. And regardless of the fact of it- and the fury and the fear- he is held. 

It’s the most that he could’ve asked for, he thinks through his half-delirious state (thinking is strange without a body, feels like an iteration run backwards through his memories or a patchwork strung together by things that he already knows), to be held with no intent to hurt. It’s very strange and not all bad, but it gives him a bit of a headache in the head that he doesn’t have and  _ that’s  _ a new headache of its own, so it’s somewhat of a relief when there’s a catch and a stutter, a loss of warmth and then a fall and then the strange sensation of his body building itself around him once more, arms and legs and hands and feet and head and hair and all. 

He is all alone now, suspended in nothingness with no company but an aching sense of loss that’s settling itself down inside his newly made body, pushing up against his heart with a frantic, keening sense of urgency. And that’s what sets him into motion again and it’s what sends his legs thrashing and his lungs fluttering from disuse as he tears through the liquid that he’s suspended in and up towards what he hopes is the surface. He’s still more instinct than anything and it shows; his movement is slow and impeded, graceless and clumsy. He sees the light from the surface through eyes that are younger than he is, and he gives one last kick and one last heave and then he breaches the surface. 

And so the very first time that Zagreus dies, it feels like coming home.

That would be because he  _ has  _ come home, he realizes as his head and shoulders burst through the Styx, whole once more and dotted with droplets that are strung throughout his hair and clinging to his shoulders like a shell or a burden or some sort of retroactive armor- and where was  _ that  _ when he was burning and battering his way through the hordes, where was  _ that  _ when he was burnt and battered and taken out by an inelegant stumble and then an immediate and somewhat embarrassing spike to the gut- and sword heavy at his side. He’s been brought right back where he started, tossed off the ledge of life and then picked up and thrown to the left, made to stare down the wolves with nothing but a body that he had almost forgotten and a brain that feels like it’s been fried. 

He stands there for a moment, overcome. And when he finally brings himself to begin the long and laborious process of wading up and out of the Styx, it feels something like being reborn into a world that no longer knows what to make of him. He feels stark against the gray, too bright and too real and too alive to be held by this place like he once was; the air is cold as it glances off his skin, his breath sharp in the cool, damp air. There is a stone floating somewhere near him and it pokes incessantly at his torso so he picks it up with all the care that he’s able to muster when he’s still half-drunk on the simple luxury of living (which is not much care at all) and then tests its weight by throwing it straight up. He catches it and watches the curl and flex of his fingers as his muscles contract and his nerves line up and down his arms, and then he tosses it to the side and listens enraptured as it thumps to the ground. He revels in the sensation of his eardrums as they rattle. He marvels at the way his skin grows cold from the Styx, wonders at the shiver that rips through him from head to toe and follows itself with a series of tiny tremors as he continues to drag himself to shore. 

This is a little unfair, he thinks as he finally climbs completely out of the pool and up into the open, watching with a morbid sort of fascination as the Styx unsticks (hah! If this whole  _ escaping _ thing fails than maybe he can do standup for the shades) itself from his skin and hisses down to nothing against the cold stone floors. It feels a bit like a slap to the face that he still can’t quite reconcile with his body- dying  _ does _ something to a god, it seems- or another spike shot through his stomach. And speaking of, he sweeps a quick look around to make sure that no one is looking directly at him and then he dashes a knuckle down towards his stomach and drives it into the flesh until he feels a soft, slight give where the skin is all smoothed over and woundless, bearing no proof of how he’d bled out on the floor of some chamber somewhere not twenty minutes ago.

He brings his hands up to his face next, too lost on all the ways that his body feels foreign to him to care that he can hear someone snickering at him now, too caught up in the sensation of his hair beneath his hands and his clothing against his skin to worry about embarrassing himself. Life feels like many, many things. Life is sensation pressed to synapse, and it burns and burns and burns; life is the push and prattle of his organs against one another as he goes on and on and on; life hurts like a spike to the stomach. The snickering has turned into a snort has turned into a giggle has turned into a laugh, and it’s inching along Zagreus’s spine without a care in the world as he turns his head towards the source. 

There is a god over in the corner. He is sitting at a desk and he has his feet kicked up on its edge and he looks ten seconds and one drab introduction away from whipping out a pillow and blanket and tottering off to sleep. His hair is a curly mess of white-gold that makes something in Zagreus’s chest twinge in recognition (but not quite, not quite _ ,  _ it’s recognition tilted slightly to the left or right or maybe up or down, he hasn’t had this body for long enough to acquaint himself with the finer points of silly things like  _ direction _ ), as his brain tugs information out from beneath the moldy stone that it went and cowered under after he found himself bleeding out on a cold chamber floor. 

“So you died then?” Hypnos, god of sleep says, knocking his heel against the desk. “That kinda sucks.” 

It kinda does. It hurt a little. There was a spike and that spike went through his stomach and that spike came out the other side and then his soul was coaxed out through the wound. It  _ did _ kinda suck.

“Uh,” Zagreus replies, and then stops for a second because his voice is a hum or a buzz and it sticks to the roof of his mouth like honey so he clears his throat and tries again, listens as the words root themselves in reality and gain conviction as his sentences barrels on and on and on. “It does. There are probably some better modes of transportation out there, don’t you think? Less… messy.”

He makes a vague gesture, and well. It’s one way to put it. 

“Eh,” Hypnos says with a shrug. It seems that he’s already losing interest, turning his attention back to the small collection of objects that are scattered all over his desk with no rhyme or reason to them at all. “It’s efficient.” 

“If nothing else,” Zagreus grumbles in halfhearted agreement. Hypnos waves him on and he wanders into the foyer of the house in a daze, dizzied by the everything up to and including his own movement, and over  _ there _ are the walls that he knows so well and over  _ there _ are the gaudy rugs that he hates with every fiber of his being and over  _ there _ is his father, looming over him as a monolith of flesh and blood and horrible facial hair, and he looks down at Zagreus and he feels like he’s falling. His father’s eyes are hard as stone, but despite that and despite the fact that he seems to radiate distaste Zagreus can’t help but wonder if maybe, just  _ maybe  _ when he was out there living and dying and living again his father hadn’t gone and learned something too. A life lesson, so to speak. 

So he stares his father down in his brand new body, and the weight of expectation settles over his chest just as it always has before, and again,  _ again _ it feels somewhat like death in that it feels familiar- like coming home, like something he’s always known- but at the end of it death welcomed him with open arms and it felt right enough, but the rest of this world and the rest of this house no longer have a hold on him and that shift has settled itself like lead in his bones. There is no going back anymore; and he knows this and he knows this for  _ sure,  _ so he is going to grasp that conviction with both hands and he is going to crush it back into himself and then he is going to get  _ out. _

But that is later and this is now, and right now he is too busy standing to run. Standing and staring and standing and staring. His blood is restless and boiling and alive, and his stomach is turned on its head and his head is lolled on his neck and he does not say a word and his father does not say a word and nobody says anything at all for a long, long time. 

As if to make up for this, when his father at last begins to speak he begins to speak fast. His words are distinct as ever and laced with that touch of venom that he’s honed into a sharp, lethal point in all these years that he’s been alive, and it becomes clear within the minute that he is saying nothing that he hasn’t said before.

“This is futile,” his father rumbles, and Zagreus hears the thousand other times he’s said the exact same thing compounded and heaved onto his back- the weight of the world, distilled and clinical and devoid of all life- as disappointment fills him like a flood. “This won’t end well,” his father says, and Zagreus begins to grow restless because a god can only hear the same thing so many times before they begin to grow bored of it. “You ought to give this up,” his father says, and Zagreus’s focus slips from his tenuous grasp and fixates itself instead on Cerberus where he lies at his father’s side, ears pricked up and tail thumping rhythms of one two, one two threes against the ground. Cerberus is more interesting than his father, because his father is his father is his father. His father’s still talking. 

This will not work, he says, and  _ gods  _ it’s hot down here, stifling and sticky-sweet; it feels like the sort of place that learned its worth through days that felt like decades and then took itself and all its self-made mourning and laid down in the dirt to die. And as for Zagreus, Zagreus has made a home from the rot at its core for one whole lifetime and a good few minutes of another, and so he  _ has  _ to wonder if his father- with his lifetime of a thousand years spent in that very same place- has ever thought of maybe investing in some sort of cooling system. He’s a god. Gods can do that sort of thing with a snap of their fingers, one press of thumb to forefinger and then a slight up-and-out push of willpower and bam! Let there be air conditioning. Really though, his father should consider it. That man needs to calm down a bit. Chill out. 

Are you even  _ listening? _

He is not. 

But he murmurs something soft and incomprehensible anyways, and it seems to be enough for his father because his father launches right back into it. Gods, does he ever  _ stop _ ?

No. Not for a while. Not until he says one last thing and then nothing else before looking back down at his work. When it becomes clear that his father will not be acknowledging him again, Zagreus simply shrugs it off and moves on. There’s not much to be said anyways, not between the two of them and not as they are now with their dramatics and somewhat rote predictability. He imagines that before this is through, they’ll be seeing each other much more than he would like; he imagines that this conversation will shape itself again and again, him and his old soul grafted onto a new body and his father staunch and unchanging where he sits high above them all, a constant forward march to stand against Zagreus’s start and stop and start and stop approach. 

Well it is what it is, he decides as he finally moves past his father and goes to pet Cerberus, as he feels the fur beneath his hands and then that same fascination regarding the simple ability to touch and feel and experience that he’s been fielding since he emerged from the Styx again. Already it’s wearing off, dazed amazement giving way to that steadfast determination that had driven him up and out of the house in the first place, and it’s bubbling up inside of him and taking over his brand-new (custom made) sense of self bit by bit. Already he feels that buzz beneath his skin that means that it’s time to go, that he has to leave all this behind and start over and over and over again. It is what it is, and this is what he has chosen to do, and he’ll see it through if it kills him.

(And it is  _ going  _ to kill him.)

So he gives Cerberus one last pat, and then he makes his way out, just as he did that first time. He feels good; his body feels right and he feels good, so he has to be careful. Too much of a good thing can kill you- and he knows this for sure- so he’s cautious as he edges his way into the dimly lit corridor, back pressed up against the wall and shadow merging into the other soft shapes already pressed into the stone as it molds itself to the swells and dips of the rock. He hears a rattling in the distance and he knows it to be the sounds of something bearing down on him so he squares his shoulders and rolls out his neck and prepares himself as best as he can. He thinks again of dying; and because he thinks again of dying, he remembers that hand on the back of his neck and the careful, deliberate handling of his soul that came with it, and for a moment he’s so overcome with longing that it feels like something tangible that he grew inside of him, right underneath his ribcage, where his heart ought to be.

There’s no time to dwell on that. His next enemy rounds the corner, chattering and advancing without pause, and he slides a leg back and swings his arms around until they’re holding his sword steady and still in front of him. Fighting stance. He’s ready, he thinks; he thinks, he hopes, he prays. 

Then he dodges an attack that’s shot at him head-on, a simple burst of flame that’s somewhat uncreative but hey, we’ve all gotta work with what we’ve got, so he’s sure to take it seriously. He throws himself to the side with all the strength he can manage and lands wrong- too far forward, too much weight pressed into his toes- and the next thing he knows he’s stumbling forwards, scrabbling to stay upright as he pinwheels his arms. He barely manages to regain his balance before they shoot again and he’s made to whirl on his heel, heat skimming past his chest in a blurred stream of red-orange. Whoever it is that he’s fighting (he can’t get a good look through all the smoke) really ought to be more careful with where they're aiming- they could seriously hurt someone if they keep waving jets of fire around all careless like that. 

Hell, he thinks as another burst of flame glances past him and pain unfurls itself quick as a whip along the length of his arm, they could get somebody  _ killed _ . 

And gods, wouldn’t that be something?

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed, please consider leaving a comment! I love hearing from you guys!
> 
> So one of these days I want to write something for meg/zag/than because there is a LOT going on there in terms of complicated interpersonal relationships and I’d love to get into all of That, but I don’t have any concrete ideas yet. One of these days. One of them.


End file.
